NHTSA e-mail: GM slow to act on safety issues

Apr. 11, 2014

AP

Written by

Detroit Free Press Business Writer

General Motors executives were shocked to learn in July that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration saw the automaker as slow to respond to safety issues compared with its peers.

A note from NHTSA about GM’s poor responses to regulators “comes like a bolt out of the blue,” said Mike Robinson, GM’s vice president of sustainability and global regulatory affairs, in an internal email dated July 23 that was revealed today as part of the investigation into the delayed recall of vehicles with defective ignition switches.

A House committee released thousands of pages of documents as part of their investigation into why the safety issue was not addressed sooner.

The defective switches have been linked to 31 crashes and 13 deaths. More than a decade after the parts were deemed defective, GM this year recalled about 2.6 million small cars.

GM was told there was a general perception at the Office of Defect Investigations (ODI) that more effort was required to get GM to act than is the case with other automakers. The concern was backed up by a list of safety concerns and the difficulties in getting GM to take quick and appropriate action when safety issues surfaced with its vehicles.

The email from NHTSA’s ODI director Frank Borris prompted a request for a meeting so GM officials could go over the safety agency’s concerns and provide more details about the automaker’s internal procedures.

Robinson noted that GM “worked way too hard to earn a reputation as the best and we are not going to let this slide.”